Birds Eye View
Friday, December 30th, 2022 08:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudioI'm pretty exhausted tonight, after a pretty crazy week! Dad's bed showed up first thing Monday morning, and since then it's been a steady stream of visitors from both the Hospice team, and the family.
I've been running a sleep deficit all week... only getting six or seven hours a night, and I'm doing twelve thousand steps a day!
I tooke Yvette for a walk this morning just after 9AM, and as soon as we were back, two cars pulled up the house... Kyangela, for Dad's second weekly bath, and an uber with Sheila & Mike inside.
It was another busy day... with Sheila frantically cleaning the kitchen and the fridge, while Mike was on his laptop still working hard to nail down the last of Dad's finances.
Sheila kept handing me more old food and other garbage to throw away, and I had to make several trips to the animal feeder in the back yard to leave the remains of two birthday cakes, a bunch of old bread, and the contents of an old box of cereal, for the squirrels and the birds.
And between Sheila's cleaning and Kyangela's bathing, I had to start a load of dirty laundry that didn't exist when I woke up!
Mike got stuck in his quest to obtain Dad's AT&T account number, because that bill has been on auto-pay for a decade, so there's no paper bill! And all efforts to gain access online had failed.
He finally had to call them on the land line from Dads room... so that he was calling FROM the phone number in question, and also had Dad in person to verify that Mike had permission to speak on his behalf.
The whole reason Sheila had gotten so obsessed with cleaning the fridge, was because she'd had ten million microwave meals delivered to the door here, that she wants me to feed to dad... three times a day!
But there was no room for all that food in the freezer so, she started making room and then got obsessed with how filthy the fridge was on the inside.
Both things, the insane amount of food, and her obsession with cleaning Dad's fridge, were symptoms of Sheila's need to gain control over... what she has to know, on some level, is his impending death.
She wound up hitting her head on the freezer door handle, while standing up from cleaning the bottom of the fridge, which brought tears to her eyes. And this was only ten minutes before they had to leave.
She regained her composure to say goodbye to DAd, but then started crying again in the kitchen with me, saying, "he just seems so frail!"
I gave her a hug, but I was thinking, yeah!.. because he's eighty eight!
------------{=0=}------------
I've been living here with Dad for just over eight years now, and in that time I've not only watched him slowly declining, but also picked his brain for all the facts and anecdotes he knows about the history of this house... which was built by his great grandfather.
And in writing all of that down, I've spent years fleshing out that story with corroborating information from the city directory and Ancestry.Org.
And the oldest anybody on his side of the family... i.e. anybody who ever lived in this house... has ever lived, was his great Aunt Nellie, who made it to 88!
His mother came close, dying at 85, but I remember quite vividly, that she kicked it not long after meeting her first great grandchild.
And Dad met his first great grandchild in the summer of 2021!
So... I've been half-expecting him to kick it, for a few years now.
--<>--
And it's not just him with Emberly on his knee last summer, or hitting the same age as Great Aunt Nellie... it's the entire story of this house, generation after generation.
The couple who owns the house gets old. One of their kids moves back in, upstairs. One parent dies early. The other lasts a few years longer. And inevitably the kid who moved back in to take care of them is the new owner.
And the cycle repeats.
--<>--
What's happening now with Dad is... strikingly traditional!
Down to the fact that he's on a death bed in the house itself, like his grandmother, and great grandmother both were!
Also the striking fact that worried relatives actually WALKED to the house to see him yesterday, from downtown! That's happened before!
And my brother Kevin is also gonna stay at an air B&B within walking distance!
And my brother Tim will be staying for over a month... a thing that's happened before!
This house is no stranger to this kind of drama at all!
--<>--
But Sheila doesn't understand the historical context, or see that she's playing a role that's been played by other daughters, when other parents were on other death beds in this house.
Weirdly, even the fact that she's the more well to do daughter, living in LA... has happened before!
Her son Mike now lives in New York, and is marrying a girl who's father was born in Ireland! And that... has kinda happened before!
------------{=0=}------------
Dad is still holding stable for the time being. He's still mentally very sharp, and drinking a lot of different fluids, from water and chocolate milk, to clamato juice, and Guinness.
He does not seem the slightest concerned that he may soon die... saying every day how he can't wait to get up and around the house again. But he continues to have no appetite, and is, slowly wasting away.
And it might seem strange, as it certainly does to Sheila & Mike, that he doesn't have an appetite.
He's home. He's alert. He's hydrated and being cared for. And He wants to get up and around. So... the only thing stopping him is the appetite!
Why on Earth did he lose it after breaking a hip?
And why won't it come back?
--<>--
And I'm figuring out that the answer is...
Because the lack of appetite was not caused by the broken hip. Rather, the broken hip was caused by the fact that he's been dying... since about last July!
What? How? What's he been dying of?
He's been dying of old age!
Something changed last July, in his cognition. Something subtle, but inevitable, given his age.
He went to pick up refills to his prescriptions as normal, but when he got them home, they disappeared!
I did not know this at the time, because I still trusted him to get, and take his own meds for himself.
I didn't figure out something was amiss until August, when he seemed unusually weak, and was even slurring his speech one morning. So I drove him to the ER.
It turned out he hadn't been taking any meds for a month and was retaining urine, which threatened to kill his kidneys. But they also found the first instance of pneumonia which would later be blamed on his apsiration of food and liquids.
I had noticed him coughing a lot more, but figured it was just an old man's smoker's cough.
--<>--
So, the ER episode of August was hinting at this problem swallowing, and it also brought to light the fact that his meds at home had vanished... which can only be attributed to a cognitive malfunction.
Back at home, being visited by physical therapists, this same cognitive malfunction lead him to become very defiant... taking crazy risks like walking the dog and falling on the ground outside... and driving his car to get beer when he was not cleared to do so yet!
After he was through the PT program, and I had taken oversight over his daily meds, those lost prescriptions from July reappeared in the kitchen base cabinet, where I know I'd looked a week earlier!
Did he hide them originally, out of some irrational paranoia? Or had he just misplaced the bag and then found it later, and returned it to the kitchen out of embarassment?
We'll never know.
But the cognitive malfunction re-emerged in the fall as I was starting my new job, and super pre-occupied at home with the fallen Mulberry tree... as this weird new behavior of buying two bags of Good 'n Fun dog treats a day, and just dumping them out on the floor for Yvette to eat each night!
He had always fed them to her one by one, and she'd never eaten that many per night up until now.
There was no rhyme or reason for what Dad was doing. He was just obsessed with going out every day to buy more. And he was also stockpiling Guinness and smokes every day.
But he was also getting lazy and not trying to interact with Yvette... preferring to simply dump the kabobs on the floor in front of her, by the handful!
Of course she ate them all, because that's what dogs do!
But then Dad's defiance came back when I tried to stop him from buying the goddam things, and get Yvette eating kibble like a normal dog!
And he was also defiant about not wearing the shoes Sheila and Colleen had bought him, preferring is old, bald tread shoes.
This cognitive malfuntion, which caused these odd behaviors like vanishing his meds, absurdly overspending, changing his routines with the dog, and the stubborn defiance... all lead him inevitably to the DMV on the day before his birthday, where he fell and broke his hip!
Then, at the hospital, they saw his pneumonia had returned, and figured out the aspiration angle.
But now I see that ALL OF IT... was due to the fact that by July of this year, Dad was simply in the earliest stage of dying... of old age!
That's why his appetite is not returing now. Because now he's in a deeper stage of dying... of old age. And loss of appetite is just what happens in that stage.
That's my bird's eye view of all this... on the 30th of December.
°¦}
https://soundcloud.com/snoozefestaudio
I've been running a sleep deficit all week... only getting six or seven hours a night, and I'm doing twelve thousand steps a day!
I tooke Yvette for a walk this morning just after 9AM, and as soon as we were back, two cars pulled up the house... Kyangela, for Dad's second weekly bath, and an uber with Sheila & Mike inside.
It was another busy day... with Sheila frantically cleaning the kitchen and the fridge, while Mike was on his laptop still working hard to nail down the last of Dad's finances.
Sheila kept handing me more old food and other garbage to throw away, and I had to make several trips to the animal feeder in the back yard to leave the remains of two birthday cakes, a bunch of old bread, and the contents of an old box of cereal, for the squirrels and the birds.
And between Sheila's cleaning and Kyangela's bathing, I had to start a load of dirty laundry that didn't exist when I woke up!
Mike got stuck in his quest to obtain Dad's AT&T account number, because that bill has been on auto-pay for a decade, so there's no paper bill! And all efforts to gain access online had failed.
He finally had to call them on the land line from Dads room... so that he was calling FROM the phone number in question, and also had Dad in person to verify that Mike had permission to speak on his behalf.
The whole reason Sheila had gotten so obsessed with cleaning the fridge, was because she'd had ten million microwave meals delivered to the door here, that she wants me to feed to dad... three times a day!
But there was no room for all that food in the freezer so, she started making room and then got obsessed with how filthy the fridge was on the inside.
Both things, the insane amount of food, and her obsession with cleaning Dad's fridge, were symptoms of Sheila's need to gain control over... what she has to know, on some level, is his impending death.
She wound up hitting her head on the freezer door handle, while standing up from cleaning the bottom of the fridge, which brought tears to her eyes. And this was only ten minutes before they had to leave.
She regained her composure to say goodbye to DAd, but then started crying again in the kitchen with me, saying, "he just seems so frail!"
I gave her a hug, but I was thinking, yeah!.. because he's eighty eight!
I've been living here with Dad for just over eight years now, and in that time I've not only watched him slowly declining, but also picked his brain for all the facts and anecdotes he knows about the history of this house... which was built by his great grandfather.
And in writing all of that down, I've spent years fleshing out that story with corroborating information from the city directory and Ancestry.Org.
And the oldest anybody on his side of the family... i.e. anybody who ever lived in this house... has ever lived, was his great Aunt Nellie, who made it to 88!
His mother came close, dying at 85, but I remember quite vividly, that she kicked it not long after meeting her first great grandchild.
And Dad met his first great grandchild in the summer of 2021!
So... I've been half-expecting him to kick it, for a few years now.
And it's not just him with Emberly on his knee last summer, or hitting the same age as Great Aunt Nellie... it's the entire story of this house, generation after generation.
The couple who owns the house gets old. One of their kids moves back in, upstairs. One parent dies early. The other lasts a few years longer. And inevitably the kid who moved back in to take care of them is the new owner.
And the cycle repeats.
What's happening now with Dad is... strikingly traditional!
Down to the fact that he's on a death bed in the house itself, like his grandmother, and great grandmother both were!
Also the striking fact that worried relatives actually WALKED to the house to see him yesterday, from downtown! That's happened before!
And my brother Kevin is also gonna stay at an air B&B within walking distance!
And my brother Tim will be staying for over a month... a thing that's happened before!
This house is no stranger to this kind of drama at all!
But Sheila doesn't understand the historical context, or see that she's playing a role that's been played by other daughters, when other parents were on other death beds in this house.
Weirdly, even the fact that she's the more well to do daughter, living in LA... has happened before!
Her son Mike now lives in New York, and is marrying a girl who's father was born in Ireland! And that... has kinda happened before!
Dad is still holding stable for the time being. He's still mentally very sharp, and drinking a lot of different fluids, from water and chocolate milk, to clamato juice, and Guinness.
He does not seem the slightest concerned that he may soon die... saying every day how he can't wait to get up and around the house again. But he continues to have no appetite, and is, slowly wasting away.
And it might seem strange, as it certainly does to Sheila & Mike, that he doesn't have an appetite.
He's home. He's alert. He's hydrated and being cared for. And He wants to get up and around. So... the only thing stopping him is the appetite!
Why on Earth did he lose it after breaking a hip?
And why won't it come back?
And I'm figuring out that the answer is...
Because the lack of appetite was not caused by the broken hip. Rather, the broken hip was caused by the fact that he's been dying... since about last July!
What? How? What's he been dying of?
He's been dying of old age!
Something changed last July, in his cognition. Something subtle, but inevitable, given his age.
He went to pick up refills to his prescriptions as normal, but when he got them home, they disappeared!
I did not know this at the time, because I still trusted him to get, and take his own meds for himself.
I didn't figure out something was amiss until August, when he seemed unusually weak, and was even slurring his speech one morning. So I drove him to the ER.
It turned out he hadn't been taking any meds for a month and was retaining urine, which threatened to kill his kidneys. But they also found the first instance of pneumonia which would later be blamed on his apsiration of food and liquids.
I had noticed him coughing a lot more, but figured it was just an old man's smoker's cough.
So, the ER episode of August was hinting at this problem swallowing, and it also brought to light the fact that his meds at home had vanished... which can only be attributed to a cognitive malfunction.
Back at home, being visited by physical therapists, this same cognitive malfunction lead him to become very defiant... taking crazy risks like walking the dog and falling on the ground outside... and driving his car to get beer when he was not cleared to do so yet!
After he was through the PT program, and I had taken oversight over his daily meds, those lost prescriptions from July reappeared in the kitchen base cabinet, where I know I'd looked a week earlier!
Did he hide them originally, out of some irrational paranoia? Or had he just misplaced the bag and then found it later, and returned it to the kitchen out of embarassment?
We'll never know.
But the cognitive malfunction re-emerged in the fall as I was starting my new job, and super pre-occupied at home with the fallen Mulberry tree... as this weird new behavior of buying two bags of Good 'n Fun dog treats a day, and just dumping them out on the floor for Yvette to eat each night!
He had always fed them to her one by one, and she'd never eaten that many per night up until now.
There was no rhyme or reason for what Dad was doing. He was just obsessed with going out every day to buy more. And he was also stockpiling Guinness and smokes every day.
But he was also getting lazy and not trying to interact with Yvette... preferring to simply dump the kabobs on the floor in front of her, by the handful!
Of course she ate them all, because that's what dogs do!
But then Dad's defiance came back when I tried to stop him from buying the goddam things, and get Yvette eating kibble like a normal dog!
And he was also defiant about not wearing the shoes Sheila and Colleen had bought him, preferring is old, bald tread shoes.
This cognitive malfuntion, which caused these odd behaviors like vanishing his meds, absurdly overspending, changing his routines with the dog, and the stubborn defiance... all lead him inevitably to the DMV on the day before his birthday, where he fell and broke his hip!
Then, at the hospital, they saw his pneumonia had returned, and figured out the aspiration angle.
But now I see that ALL OF IT... was due to the fact that by July of this year, Dad was simply in the earliest stage of dying... of old age!
That's why his appetite is not returing now. Because now he's in a deeper stage of dying... of old age. And loss of appetite is just what happens in that stage.
That's my bird's eye view of all this... on the 30th of December.
°¦}
